House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, shown here arriving for a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington May 12, 2011, was interviewed by CNBC's Larry Kudlow May 16, 2011. She said the deficit must be reduced, which means looking at cuts in entitlements, such as Medicare, as well as subsidies for business.

The government has 11 weeks to raise the debt ceiling or be in default.

Last week House Majority Leader John Boehner set the Republican position: no tax increases, and any dollar to raise the debt ceiling must be accompanied by a dollar reduction in spending.

"Did he say then that the Republicans would vote for avoiding the default if we don’t move forward?" Pelosi responded Monday, noting that Republican support was hard to find when Democrats worked with the Bush administration to enact the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

"We all know we must reduce the deficit ... we must put everything on the table," she said. "We’ve got to look at cuts, for sure—waste, fraud, abuse, duplication, obsolescence, you name it."

At the same time, cuts can't be so draconian that growth is stifled, particularly in education and research and development.

The companies are "going to make more than a trillion dollars. Don't tell me they need $30 billion over 10 years. No one is going to cry over the oil companies. We’re saying to seniors you’re going to pay $6,000 more for fewer benefits so we can give tax cuts to big oil."

"What a shame at a time when the IMF is at center stage for what’s happening in Europe and Greece and the world financially to have this disruption," Pelosi said.

With the U.S. owning 18 percent of the IMF, she foresees no congressional investigation at this time into how the fund, or any other international institution, is spending the money it gets from this country.

"For a long time now many of us have been saying we should subject any number of our international financial institutions … to scrutiny as to what the original purpose was [and] how they are fulfilling it. Let’s just take a look because there are important resources put there and we want to make sure we’re getting the best for it," she said.